Guide to RSS Feeds
When you are browsing your favourite websites, you may have noticed a link inviting you to ‘syndicate this site’, 'add RSS', or something similar. This is actually asking you if you would like to start receiving their information and having it displayed it a place easier for you to read, generally the homepage of your Internet browser.
These are RSS Feeds, and are currently the hottest thing in web communication. There are disagreements as to what RSS actually stands for, but the modern and generally accepted answer is Really Simple Syndication. It started off more technical, as everything on the Internet does, with Rich Site Summary, however I think that it will stick with Really Simple Syndication as that is exactly what it is, really simple!
In essence, the feeds themselves are web pages that are designed to be read by computers rather than people.
An average RSS Feed will include a headline, either a brief description of the article or a snippet of the actual text, and a link directing you to the main page that includes the story you are interested in.
Below is an example of a homepage that has some RSS Feeds, there's the local weather report, news from Eviser, local and World news and even a ladybird crawling around there!
Why Would I Use an RSS Feed?
There are so many people writing so many articles, blogs and newspages, that it could take you all day, everyday visiting the individual pages getting all the information you’re interested in. RSS feeds allow you to subscribe to news from particular websites and have them shown in an RSS Reader (sometimes called an Aggregator), the most commonly used of these is inbuilt into the iGoogle personalised homepage. This places all the news that you have asked for into one place for your easy perusal. It even updates automatically for you!
The only downside to this is that the site that you want to information from must have set up an RSS Feed, however this is simply done and even the most basic blog sites are now publishing them via RSS.
RSS feeds are of to people who wish to publish their frequently changing pages, this is why it’s ideal for, and mainly used by, news websites and also blog sites. Many big companies are also starting to publish RSS Feeds in order to keep customers, both current and potential, up to date on their activities.
Eviser has its own RSS Feed, which can be found here. Feel free to subscribe and keep abreast of all goings on at Eviser, both serious and fun!
If you wish to comment on this article, then please don't hesitate to contact me at markcampbell@eviser.co.uk.
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